For airport runways, rigid specifications require paint stripes with two layers of paint, where a first set of parallel stripes is precisely laid down over both straight and curved striping patterns and the second paint layer has to register upon the first stripe within very tight tolerances. This leads to considerable registration and alignment problems with prior art equipment. With walk-behind hand steered striper units it takes unusual manual skill to make the long straight lines for airport runway without wavering from strict tolerances. It is even more difficult to precisely over paint a first stripe with a second coat and track closely over both straight lines and curves defining aircraft taxi line paths. Furthermore walk-behind stripers are so slow that the cost for an airport to be closed for striping is excessive.
Motorized painters conveyed on trucks, for example, may be fast and might be used for single line highway striping, but it is not feasible to use them at high travel speeds for registering a second stripe coat precisely over a first stripe coat, as required by airport specifications. Furthermore there are even more significant problems, for example in attempting to register parallel sets of stripes laid about curved paths, that are not resolved in the prior art.
Consider the critical timing factor of airport runway striping. Thus, the airports have to be shut down, so painting time is of the essence. Airport shutdown costs could reasonably run $10,000.00 an hour, for example. Thus, there has been no suitable way known in the prior art to both precisely meet stringent specifications for painting two coat stripes while significantly reducing the airport shutdown time involved.
In my parent application, I have introduced an advantageous manually manipulated, ride-on motorized stripe painting system that paints about five times faster than a walk-behind striper unit. This is an ideal speed for airport striping, where care must be taken to steer carefully along a preplanned striping pathway. By articulating a push-tractor propeller unit to a manually steered paint striper unit carrying all the painting equipment, the system ideally paints both straight and curved line stripes. Of significant importance is the feature that the tractor drive transmission operates the striper in a straight line painting mode with hands-off manual steering to considerably reduce the skill of an operator necessary to paint long straight stripes such as necessary for airport runways.
Thus, it is an object of this invention to provide a new embodiment of articulated push-tractor striper assembly that is particularly adapted for striping airport runways.
It is another object of this invention to reduce the airport downtime necessary for painting.
A still further object of this invention is to provide a motorized striper vehicle that precisely tracks a first stripe paint coating to deposit a second coat of paint in register therewith.
Other objects, features and advantages of the invention will be found throughout the following description.